More Questions Surround Microsoft’s OOXML Format

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More Questions Surround Microsoft’s OOXML Format

The controversial Office Open XML file format is already an Ecma standard, but its pending approval as an ISO standard is drawing a great deal of criticism.

In December of 2006, Microsoft cleared one major hurdle in the office document format war by winning the approval of Ecma, which made the company's Office Open XML doc format a standard. While OOXML will be freely licensed by Microsoft so other office software developers can support the format, arguments about exactly how "open" the OOXML standard will be are still being debated. See Scott Gilbertson's report on Wired News.

Microsoft will score a big win if its file format, which will be the native format for office documents in Office 2007 in Windows Vista and Office 2008 on the Mac, wins the approval of the International Standards Organization (ISO), the committee recognized as the highest authority in the land for technical standards.

The deadline for ISO member bodies to submit objections for the fast-tracking of OOXML is February 5. On that date, the ISO will decide whether or not to usher it through the approval process quickly or request revisions.

The intrepid scholars at Groklaw have been busy digging up the inconsistencies, contradictions and overlap with existing standards within OOXML, and today they have posted a lengthy article highlighting what they see as major problems. They argue that OOXML's proposal needs significant revisions, and that it should not be fast-tracked.

The essay is worth a read, as it does an excellent job of spelling out the points within OOXML that the open-source community at large takes issue with. If Microsoft ends up getting removed from the fast-track process at the ISO, it will have to wait several more months before it gains approval, and that leaves more time for detractors to file complaints and argue against standardization.

It also leaves Microsoft with a major piece of software on the market (Office 2007) that doesn't use a fully-standardized native document format, which will slow OOXML's adoption by governments and institutions keen on standardization.